According to a robust machine learning model that can predict pandemic impact even in smaller cities, with 75% of the population in the Capital Region in New York remaining at home, the COVID-19 pandemic will peak locally in the second half of May. If the rate of people staying home drops to 50%, it will peak in early June. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researcher Malik Magdon-Ismail tailored the models he is developing to work with sparse data points, like those available during the early phase in a pandemic or in smaller cities, which ordinarily make trend-spotting difficult. "There are no simple, robust, general tools that, for example, officials in Albany could use to make projections," said Magdon-Ismail, a professor of computer science, and expert in machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition. "These models show that the projections vary enormously from one city to another. This knowledge could relieve some of the uncertainty that is around in developing policy."

No city in the world is ready for the disruption that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring. This is the conclusion of a new review by management consultancy Oliver Wyman, which considers the readiness of 105 cities to cope with AI-inspired digital change, and finds even the smartest need to make urgent and "significant improvements". The study ranks cities on four criteria: the quality of their plan (defined as'vision'); their ability to execute on it ('activation'); the quality of their talent and infrastructure ('asset base'); and how the interplay of these last two, their activation and assets, impact their overall momentum ('trajectory'). Singapore is most prepared overall, the report says, with an average score of 75.8 out of 100 across the four criteria. But the review states no city is even close to being fully prepared.

Robots aren't replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of existing work, according to a new Brookings Institution report. The report, published Thursday, says roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with'high exposure' to automation - meaning at least 70 percent of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters and others in food services; short-haul truck drivers; and clerical office workers. Robots aren't replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of today's work, according to a new Brookings Institution report. 'That population is going to need to upskill, reskill or change jobs fast,' said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and lead author of the report.

Robots and artificial intelligence are set to cause massive upheaval in the labor market, and that will naturally have a dramatic impact on where workers choose to live. We recently described the work of Iyad Rahwan, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab who claims that smaller cities will feel the greatest impact of automation. His study concludes that larger cities have a disproportionate number of jobs that require cognitive and analytical tasks, while smaller cities have a disproportionate amount of routine clerical work. That means the latter suffer more from the arrival of machines in the workplace. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Rahwan explained how that will spur the growth of megacities.

The lack of diversity at tech companies is well-established: Less than 10 percent of workers at Google and LinkedIn are non-Asian minorities, for example, and only 31 percent of employees at Google are women. But the technology industry is guilty of another serious blunder that hasn't spurred the same volume of national conversation: a lack of interest, and failure to invest, in the capacity of small and mid-sized cities to shape technology's evolution. Adrian Perkins (@Diplomatofthe8) is a third-year student at Harvard Law School, founder of the marketing tech company E.merge, and strategic technology advisor to his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. Many of the best-known tech companies were launched and remain headquartered in Silicon Valley, a region that's home to 3 million people. Tomorrow's tech ideas are also being tested in larger cities: witness AmazonFresh Pickup (Seattle) and Uber's autonomous vehicle trials (San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Tempe, Arizona); although smart city initiatives are taking off in smaller cities, the larger cities still have more than their share of smart city projects, not to mention the media coverage that perpetuates larger cities' market advantage.

The robot takeover will start in the smaller cities. Towns and small cities have a smaller proportion of jobs that will be resilient to automation than larger urban centres, according to a new study. By looking at the jobs that are most susceptible to automation and their distribution across different US cities, Iyad Rahwan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and his team have found a trend between the size of a city and the impact we should expect artificial intelligence and robots to have on human workers. Roughly speaking, cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants are more at risk. The East Coast cities are full of jobs that should be resilient to automation. Washington DC, for example, has many government-related roles that are hard to automate, and New York, with its population of 8.5 million, is able to support many specialist jobs too.

While artificial intelligence is a loaded term that for some may conjure up images of a malicious Skynet system from the Terminator movie franchise, the reality is not as ominous. And when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, argued during the U.S. Congress' first AI hearing -- dubbed "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence" -- that it is already at work in the United States, improving the efficiency and productivity of systems across the map, he was right. "Artificial intelligence is already seeping into our daily lives," said Cruz, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. The hearing, which included representatives from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA, among others, focused on the potential implications machine learning will have on the country's labor market, national security and transportation. One of the largest areas for growth through artificial intelligence is smart city planning and smart infrastructure.